DISSERTATION ZU SØREN KIERKEGAARD

Revealing a Kantian leaning contra the broadly Hegelian confidence that reason can mediate the dif- ferences between the thing and the human knowledge of the thing, between epistemology and ontology , Kierkegaard sharply delineates between the word or the concept and the thing itself; reality underlies concepts and language but remains decisively inaccessible to them. He objects to submitting the subject to levelling rules, no matter whether these derive from philosophical logic like in Hegel’s system or from concrete organisational necessities like those emerging with the rise of capitalist mass production. In short, rather than positing the notion of the human being as already and primordially encompassing ideality and reality with the task of becoming the increasingly intensified manifestation of this primordial truth , we will see that Haufniensis argues that the self or spirit is a relational reality that arises out of the encounter with the eternal. University of Virginia Press, Ironically enough, Howells seems to give himself some of the reasons for a certain underestimation of his literature. In an early upbuilding discourse framed as a meditation on Job 1:

Time can seem long to the human being because he has the eternal in his consciousness and measures the moments with it. To put the question in terms familiar from chapter two, if the self is the spirit and the spirit always emerges oppositionally out of the body-soul synthesis, can there be any final return to the temporal that remains faithful to the eternal? But in another sense he is infinitely far away. To exemplify that Kierkegaard’s philosophy provides a deeper understanding of Howells’s account, I will examine three major personages, March, Lindau and Fulkerson. Pennsylvania State University Press, ,—4.

Don Giovanni simply is what he is, without deliberation or choice. Haufniensis gestures toward the difficulties while also asserting the possibility of some kind of actual commensurability between the absolute demands of eternity on each individual and full engagement with the relative demands of family, society, etc. Dover Publications,[—44]—5; cf. This signals an important ethical problematic for Kant: Human life would never move beyond immediacy into the spiritual life of consciousness, self-consciousness, and freedom.

Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. If you live as the lily and the bird live, then you are a Christian—which the lily and the bird neither are nor can become. Some of the categories are somewhat fluid, moving from one side of the fence to the other depending on the book or author.

Sin never arises necessarily or quantitatively, but like freedom arises by a qualitative leap. Fordham University Quarterly 55 Walter de Gruyter, ; David E. For Kierkegaard it goes without saying that the individual is the ‘bottle-neck through which history develops’ [2].

The call to achieve transfigured commensurability and the persistent dissonances that form the backcloth of this call characterizes and kierksgaard the Kierkegaardian task of becoming a self. Indeed, the intersection of temporality and eternity in what Kierkegaard calls the moment provides the setting for the distinctively human task of becoming a self. Thus the Christian is klerkegaard awake, which neither the innocently ignorant bird nor the spiritlessly ignorant human being eøren he is wide awake, awake to God.

On one hand, as I noted above, there is a sense in which the notion of the author dissipates, allowing the reader to engage fully with the text. While speculative thought or representation may be able to grasp a causal chain of natural necessity within its logic, such speculations cannot lay hold of the actual. But the impor- tant point to be made here is that human freedom must not be conceived in dissergation of the ability to choose between good and evil, as if good and evil are two transcendental realities that sit, fully formed, before an equally transcendentally free agent.

Indeed, worldly riches and power can be analogues of spiritual wealth and loftiness. Here the external marks of poverty and wealth, loftiness and lowliness—these things are outward illusions that do not reflect on the eternal i. And most of søreh, I am thankful for my wife.

William Dean Howell’s A Hazard of New Fortunes and Soren Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Existence

Rather, historical actual- ity refers to the dynamic process of becoming conscious of having already been given the gift of dissrrtation and the increasing awareness of the ultimately religious task of dissettation the self. Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. Here, mechanistic determinism constitutes our knowledge of phenomena, whereas the notion of teleology functions heuristically to regulate our empirical investigations, primarily by allowing us to imagine the natural world as a unified totality.

For Kierkegaard, faith in Christ may well train us for eternity, but only at the eventual expense of temporality. March is no doubt the central figure.

Schleiermacher und Kierkegaard Niels Jorgen Capperlorn. As the next line indicates, the self or spirit does not exist through existing before others.

Kierkegaards Begriff Der Wiederholung : Dorothea Glöckner :

That God is something totally different that falls outside of any human yardstick means that God has no characteristics. In this dissertation, I largely bracket questions of authorship 38 Cf.

Some of the best examples include: To put the question in terms familiar from chapter two, if the self is the spirit and the spirit always emerges oppositionally out of the body-soul synthesis, can there be any final return to the temporal that remains faithful to the eternal? Because of this, Kant believes the heuristic suppositions of God, freedom, and the immortality of the soul available through practical reason can then function as elements within theoretical reason, despite the fact that such notions are unavailable to theoretical reason alone.

Moreover, following the lead of Kant and Schelling, Kierke- gaard was inspired to structure the human being so that that she bears within herself the eternal and the temporal—a synthetic dissonance from which kisrkegaard characterization of the self as an ethical task emerges.